VENICE, Italy—As the water rose, Alessandro Ferro made a desperate effort to prevent a devastating flood on the islands of the Venetian Lagoon.
The mayor of the lagoon town of Chioggia asked for the first-ever use of submersible steel floodgates that had been built for billions of euros to block out the sea. But he could find no one willing and authorized to raise the barriers.
On Nov. 12, Venice, Chioggia and surrounding islands suffered their worst flood in over half a century. Waters rose over 6 feet above the normal level. Around 80% of the city was inundated, causing damage estimated by Venice’s mayor at over €1 billion ($1.11 billion). Brackish water filled the crypt of the 12th-century St. Mark’s Basilica. Gondolas and public ferries were left strewn on walkways.
The 78 yellow steel barriers, already tested but not yet fully operational, stayed where they have been, on the seabed.
“I am bitter. I am disappointed. It was a risk worth taking,” said Mr. Ferro. “Had it worked, we would’ve stayed dry.”
Why the floodgates stayed down while Venice drowned is a tale of corruption, cautious bureaucracy and public distrust.
Italy’s ingenuity at engineering and design helped turn it into one of the wealthiest countries in the post-World War II era. But its failure to protect Venice, a jewel of European civilization, from the known menace of ever-higher tides is just the latest example of the country’s struggle to adapt to a changing world.
Italy began working on a plan to protect Venice after 1966, when the city suffered one of the worst floods—the acqua alta—in its 1,400-year history.
It took until the 1980s for national and local authorities to agree on a solution: the construction of retractable barriers across the Venetian Lagoon’s three mouths that open into the Adriatic Sea.
The barriers would be kept underwater when not in use to minimize the structure’s environmental and visual impact.
The megaproject was dubbed MOSE, a technical acronym that is also Italian for Moses, who parted the sea to save his people.
Venice didn’t need a miracle. Rotterdam, London and other cities have successfully installed retractable barriers in river estuaries.
Construction in the lagoon didn’t begin until 2003 because over a dozen public bodies, expert panels and courts had to first approve the project’s design. The government in Rome budgeted €1.7 billion. A private consortium began building with a 2012 completion target.
Then, in 2014, a corruption scandal forced the government to take control of the project. With the project 80% complete, work slowed to a near halt. Since resuming the following year, progress has been incremental.
The MOSE project is now about 93% finished, according to the consortium building it, which now projects it will be fully operational by the end of 2021. Costs have ballooned to €5.5 billion.
“MOSE is like a pendulum. On one end there is corruption, and on the other end, bureaucracy. And this way of doing things applies to the whole of Italy, not just to Venice,” said Giovanni Cecconi, who worked on the project as a senior hydraulic engineer until 2015.
Mr. Cecconi wants to see MOSE put to use as soon as possible. “Its benefits far outweigh its construction and maintenance costs,” he said. “We need it in order to make the city livable for its residents.”
Until recently, the tide has only occasionally risen more than 140 centimeters (55 inches) above its average level in 1872, when records began. This month, the acqua alta surpassed that level four times.
On Nov. 12, the high tide reached 187 centimeters, the highest level since 1966, and far exceeding official forecasts made just a few hours earlier, as a strong wind pushed more water into the lagoon than expected.
Shopkeepers and residents boarded up ground-floor doors and windows. Some mockingly wrote “MOSE” on their homemade dams. They usually weren’t enough. The water seeped into buildings through toilets, sinks and electric conduits. The smell of sewage filled Venice’s gothic alleys and Renaissance palazzi.
Andrea Sandi, co-owner of the canal-side restaurant Paradiso Perduto (“Paradise Lost”), tried to save what he could. In the kitchen, he found the dishwasher, a fridge and a fryer bobbing in water that reached his thighs.
“What if we had an efficient and functioning dam? It would’ve saved us,” Mr. Sandi said. He estimated the floods cost the restaurant €50,000 in damage and lost revenue.
Like many Venetians, Mr. Sandi doubts MOSE will ever work. “I think MOSE is just utopian. Its only use, in a very Italian way, has been to feed corruption,” he said.
“The Dutch had a similar problem. They organized themselves and today Rotterdam has dams and there’s no flooding,” Mr. Sandi said. “We wanted underwater hinges, so that our dams vanish, you can’t see them. Great, that’s beautiful. But is it really tenable?”
When Italy finally awarded contracts in the 1980s, it chose an untried design.
At the three openings between the lagoon and the sea, the 78 steel floodgates, each weighing up to 330 tons, are installed in cement chambers burrowed into the seabed. The gates fill with water when not in use; when compressed air is pumped in, expelling the water, the gates pivot upward until they breach the surface and face the Adriatic.
MOSE’s champions say the disappearing barriers are what makes the structure so innovative, and that growing pains during construction are normal for such a large and complex project.
“With something like MOSE you don’t just flip a switch and it starts up,” said Alessandro Soru, an engineer who is MOSE’s project manager. “It’s a long process that takes tweaking and based on the tests we have done there is absolutely no indication that MOSE won’t work.”
Luigi D’Alpaos, a hydraulic engineer who has studied ways to protect Venice throughout his career, said the decision to keep the barriers underwater doomed the project.
“The running and maintenance costs will become prohibitive,” said Mr. D’Alpaos, who was a student near Venice during the 1966 flooding and was involved in initial studies to prevent future floods. “But since we’ve reached a point of no return, it should be finished.”
Many Venetians opposed MOSE from the beginning, fearing it would hurt the lagoon’s ecosystem. Environmental groups appealed to stop the project, delaying its start. The rising costs and the corruption scandal only intensified public opposition, with residents taking to the streets with posters that read “MOSE only benefits those who are making it.”
The project was hobbled from the outset by its funding process. The Italian government approved the budget yearly, making long-term planning and changes to approved plans difficult.
The project almost died in 2014, when a system of bribes, graft and other forms of corruption was discovered. Work stopped as the regional governor and the chairman of Consorzio Venezia Nuova, the consortium building MOSE, were arrested along with more than 30 other officials and managers.
Some of the dozens of people charged reached plea deals, some were cleared in court and some accusations were dropped when the statute of limitations ran out.
Giancarlo Galan, who for 15 years was governor of the Veneto region where Venice is the capital, was charged with taking kickbacks to give the go-ahead for the construction of MOSE. He reached a plea agreement to serve jail time and pay a fine. Mr. Galan couldn’t be reached for comment.
Giovanni Mazzacurati, the former chairman of Consorzio Venezia Nuova, was charged with paying bribes to politicians in exchange for their approval of the project. Mr. Mazzacurati, who also reached a plea agreement, died this year.
After the allegations emerged, the Italian government appointed commissioners to run the consortium. Most work ceased for a year while the commissioners reviewed all contracts.
Further delays came in 2015, when the consortium was unable to renew its contract for electricity—the state utility was prohibited from supplying a company facing corruption charges—and couldn’t get bank loans, even with government guarantees.
Costs continued to mount, with staff to be paid and maintenance outlays rising.
Also in 2015, the underwater floodgates’ hinges, meant to last 100 years, began to show signs of rust. Engineers had noticed problems with the metal early on, but because of a labyrinthine approval process, switching to a different material quickly wasn’t possible. And a system of dehumidifiers, while planned for, hadn’t been installed yet. A tender to replace some parts was launched this year.
“The bureaucracy discouraged improvement,” said Dario Berti, who quit as MOSE’s chief engineer in 2017 out of frustration at the delays. “With the series of stringent rules that were imposed, we lost sight of the key objectives. Legality was restored, but the flooding in Venice is our doing.”
Corruption and mismanagement under the consortium’s previous heads made rigorous controls necessary, said Giuseppe Fiengo, MOSE’s government-appointed commissioner in charge of administration and legal issues.
“I take full responsibility for the delay, but it had to be done,” Mr. Fiengo said of the time lost in 2015, when he and other commissioners took over. “We found a complete mess. It took time to get to the bottom of a system that had been constructed in such a way that it could only be understood by the corrupt people who had put it in place.”
Mr. Fiengo has managed to recoup more than €100 million through lawsuits against previous managers and contractors. Prosecutors said the corruption cost many times that amount. More than a dozen legal battles are still under way.
The delays and ballooning costs have fueled another problem: Venetians now loathe the ill-fated project.
“At a certain point, people realized that all the money available to help Venice was going to MOSE and the rest of the lagoon was being ignored,” said Mr. Fiengo. “People turned on us and now we are hated.”
In the days before the Nov. 12 flood, Mr. Ferro, the mayor of Chioggia, began to panic when he saw extraordinary tidal forecasts. He wanted to deploy the floodgates.
But he didn’t know who to call, because it wasn’t clear who was in charge.
While MOSE’s consortium and commissioners are responsible for building the project, the Italian government hasn’t decided who will operate it.
Mr. Ferro first called the head of public works in the Veneto region, only to find out he had recently retired and his position hadn’t been filled.
Then he phoned Mr. Fiengo, the commissioner.
“I told him I really want the barriers raised because the situation is looking really bad,” said Mr. Ferro. “Since we don’t know whose decision this is, let’s all agree,” Mr. Ferro said he told the commissioner.
Mr. Fiengo said he didn’t immediately rule out the suggestion. He turned to MOSE’s engineers, suggesting they ask Italy’s civil protection service to order the gates raised in one of the three openings to the lagoon.
But engineers said the system wasn’t ready. Some of the giant compressed-air pumps weren’t hooked up. Tests, though successful, had relied on a limited number of compressors to raise a limited number of gates. And MOSE had never been tested in rough waters or high tide.
Deploying the gates could result in the flooding of undersea tunnels, the engineers said, damaging the system and putting the lives of workers at risk.
“We are almost done, but MOSE isn’t ready yet and can’t be used until we have all the compressors working,” said Mr. Soru, the chief engineer.
The system is designed to block tides up to 300 centimeters. If the barriers had been raised and worked as intended, Venice would have stayed dry. Closing even one of the lagoon’s three openings could reduce the water level by enough to avert some of the worst damage of a tide as high as it was on Nov. 12, according to the mathematical models of Mr. Cecconi, the engineer formerly with MOSE. The crypt of St. Mark’s Basilica, for instance, would have been spared.
Once MOSE is working, it is unclear how long it will be able to shelter Venice, because it was designed on the assumption that sea levels would rise less than are now forecast.
The project was designed to last 100 years with a forecast of a 60 centimeter rise in the average sea level. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change now says sea levels could rise up to 110 centimeters by the end of this century.
“In the best-case scenario, MOSE gains us 100 years. In the worst-case scenario, 50,” said Mr. Cecconi. “It’s not a definitive solution. But we need to lift it to restore public trust.”
For many Venetians, a functioning MOSE could make the difference between staying here or leaving for terra firma. The city’s population has been in steady decline for decades, partly because floods have become more frequent. Where 171,000 once lived along its canals, now only 50,000 reside here.
“I love my city. I wouldn’t want to leave unless things really become untenable,” said Antonio Dantelli, a 62-year-old lifelong Venice resident.
On a recent rainy morning, Mr. Dantelli put on thigh-high rubber boots and went out to see his city empty of tourists. “Before, the water rarely reached 140 centimeters,” he said, indicating the flooded sidewalk. “Now it’s reaching 180. What will we do in 10 years?”
Write to Margherita Stancati at margherita.stancati@wsj.com and Eric Sylvers at eric.sylvers@wsj.com
